HAAi – Ignition
HAAi is back with “Ignition”, the second single from DIGITiSE (W26), the album she’s built as a companion to last year’s HUMANiSE and specifically as music to play in her own DJ sets. This one’s a collaboration with Echonomist. Teneil Throssell, who records as HAAi, calls it a sequel to “Go!” from HUMANiSE, so it’s another piece of the through-line that ties the two records together.
The reason it lands as more than a dancefloor cut is the writing underneath it. She’s said the lyric documents her coming of age as a queer kid in a small town, “desperate to leave”. That’s a lot of feeling to route through a breaks track, but the pairing is the point: taking something that heavy to the place she says feels most free, the floor. Echonomist’s fingerprints are on the breaks side of it, he’s talked about how the collaboration reminded him how much he loves that sound, and you can hear that pull between the two of them.
DIGITiSE lands October 9 on Mute, her third album after 2022’s Baby, We’re Ascending. Like the title track before it, “Ignition” is one HAAi has been road-testing in her sets ahead of release, refining it against real crowds rather than in isolation, which fits an album made for exactly that context.
